Dad’s Lawn Chair on the Gravel Bar

Nobody said anything. Dustin had his head down. Ward took his hat off and held it against his chest for a second, and then put it back on.

I stayed kneeling there by the chair with my hand on the arm of it, my mother’s old folding lawn chair, and I did not get up for a good while.

Dustin carried the cooler back up the bank. He came back down for the chair, but Dad was not ready to give it up yet, so he went up and talked with Elof on the bridge instead.

I heard him asking Elof about feed prices at the co op, and whether his fence on the creek side would hold beef cattle, and Elof telling him to put a water gap in by the willows and keep the cows off the bank.

Ward packed up his fly box and said he would see Dad Sunday at church.

Then he leaned down close to Dad’s ear and said something I did not catch. Dad nodded. Ward climbed the bank with Dustin’s hand under his arm.

Then it was just Dad and me on the gravel bar, with the sun up high and warm and the creek running bright and the whole green valley spread out above us.

I sat down on the stones beside his chair. I opened the wax paper on one of the egg sandwiches and handed him half, the way Mom used to do on this same morning every year.

He ate about two bites. Then he set the sandwich on his knee, and leaned his head back against the top of the webbing, and closed his eyes against the sun.

“Halsey,” he said, without opening them.

“Yeah, Dad,” I said. “I’m right here.”

“That boy’s going to be all right,” he said. “He’s got some sense in him.”

“I think so too,” I said, and I found that I meant it.

“You didn’t call him. Friday.” He opened one eye and looked at me. “I know you wanted to. I saw your hand on that phone at my kitchen table.”

“I wanted to,” I said. “I wanted to pretty bad, Dad.”

“I’m proud of you for that.” He closed the eye again. “Your mother would have been proud of you too.”

He hummed a few lines of a hymn then, the one Mom used to sing at the kitchen sink, low and off key the way he always does. Then he stopped humming partway through the second verse.

I looked over at him. His chin had dropped onto the front of his vest, right over the pocket with the snap where the gate key was, and his hands were folded on the cork grip of his rod.

I let him sleep. I took the rod out of his hands and laid it on the gravel, and I tipped his hat down a little so the sun would not get in his eyes, and I sat there beside him and watched the creek.

The next spring, at a quarter after four on the first Saturday in May, a pickup with a brand new heat shield pulled into Dad’s driveway in town, and my son in law got out and carried Mom’s folding chair all the way down to the oak hole.

But that was another year, and that is another morning.

This one was the bridge. And by nine the creel was full, and Dad was asleep in the chair.